5.10.2017 Daily Links

The journeys that travelers take always, without exception among conscious venturers, carry the trekker inward as well as outward into the world, so much so that a successful narrative of peregrination will ever incline to examine the psyche of the inscribing sojourner at least to a similar degree as it values the incisive and colorful description of the new surfaces of the cosmos where wayfaring itinerants are wont to wander.

This Day in History

Today in relation to a transcontinental railroad is Golden Spike Day, with an annual commemoration in Promontory, Utah, while the National Science Foundation celebrates its birthday on this date, and the reactionary jurisdictions of North and South Carolina mandate the celebration of the bigoted, even fascist, ‘holiday’ of Confederate Memorial Day; in imperial Han China two thousand forty-five years ago,ancient astronomers detected a sunspot, one of the first Chinese cases of such an observation; more or less precisely ninety-eight years hence, in the year 70, Roman Emperor Vespasian’s son, Titus, initiated a massive siege of Jerusalem with an attack on the city’s third wall and the marking of the days that the rebellious Jewish state would survive Rome’s enmity; five hundred twenty years ahead of our current light and air, Amerigo Vespucci supposedly first embarked from Cadiz for the continents that are now his namesakes; MORE HERE

As quoted in An Introduction to Protestant Theology (1982) by Helmut Gollwitzer, p. 174.

Faith in God’s revelation has nothing to do with an ideology which glorifies the status quo.

As quoted in An Almanac of the Christian Church (1987) by William D. Blake.

Doc of the Day

1. Vannevar Bush, 1945.

2. Edsger Dijkstra, 1962.

3. Jerrilyn Jacobs, 2002.

Numero Uno—“New Responsibilities for GovernmentOne lesson is clear from the reports of the several committees attached as appendices. The Federal Government should accept new responsibilities for promoting the creation of new scientific knowledge and the development of scientific talent in our youth.

We are hosting a special contest from February 1, 2017 – June 1, 2017! Send your short fiction (1,000 – 6,000 words) or poetry collection (3 – 10 pages). The grand prize is $325. The second place prize will be $100, and the third place prize will be $75. Each of the three winners will have their work published, and will also have a full feature interview on our website and in our bi-monthly electronic magazine.

A Guardian look at a podcast from England that looks at this fundamental aspect of society which is often ignored: “McInerney is a rarity in today’s literary fiction in her focus on working-class characters. The journalist and social historian Lynsey Hanley joins us in the studio for an exploration of how this social marginalisation might have occurred. She takes us back 60 years, to the publication of Richard Hoggart’s groundbreaking study, The Uses of Literacy, which chronicled the challenge to old social norms from the emergence, after the second world war, of a confident and affluent working-class, fed by a burgeoning mass media. We also discuss the reissue of Hanley’s own book, Estates, and find out what has changed in the 10 years since this “intimate history” of the council estate was published.”

A Verge interview with a scrappy small publisher who takes on the big boys: “That was a decade after Johnson’s first spat with Amazon, when Melville House’s books were pulled from the site completely until Johnson paid what he referred to as “a bribe.” More recently, he and the team at Melville House have spent plenty of time tweeting and blogging criticisms of Amazon’s new physical bookstores, which they take issue with because they’re run algorithmically and don’t employ booksellers. At the London Book Fair in March, Johnson live tweeted the pitiful traffic to Amazon Publishing’s booth, which some weirdo decided to set up directly across from Melville House’s.”

A Poets & Writers look at the work of Asian writers encountering Southern culture: ” The history and reality of being Asian American in the South are often rendered invisible when it comes to mainstream discourse. Four Kundiman fellows worked to challenge this erasure by uplifting the voices of Asian American poets in the South through the panel, “Self-Articulation and Solidarity: Asian American Poets Encounter the South,” a hybrid poetry reading and discussion at the New Orleans Poetry Festival on April 21.”

A New York Magazine look at the social, political, and economic conflicts and contradictions of the newly emerging ‘far right’: “When did the right wing get so bizarre? Consider: For a brief and confusing moment earlier this year, milk somehow became a charged symbol of both white supremacy and support for Donald Trump. The details are postmodern, absurdist, and ominous — not unlike the forces that brought them about. In January, the actor Shia LaBeouf mounted an art installation designed to protest the president. The next month, neo-Nazis who organized on the message board 4chan crashed the show, where they started chugging from milk jugs — because northern Europeans digest milk well, or because milk is … white. In other words, an innocent dairy beverage as old as time had been conscripted as a Donald Trump surrogate on the internet. It was yet another message-board in-joke — freighted with political meaning — suddenly in the news.”